Takeshi Kogahara’s “Nagisa” is one of the darkest films to come out of Japan so far this year — in both senses of the word. In this fractured fever dream, secrets lurk in places where daylight doesn’t penetrate: a household closet that serves as both a children’s den and a prison; an apparently haunted tunnel that acts as a portal into a young man’s troubled past.
That young man is Fuminao (Yuzu Aoki), a surly university student who has moved to Tokyo from a broken home in Nagasaki. He isn’t much fun to be around (just ask his ex-girlfriend, played by Kana Kita), though it’s initially hard to tell if his aloofness is a pose or the product of a deeper malaise.
When some coworkers from his part-time job drag Fuminao to an eerie tunnel that was the scene of a fatal bus crash several years earlier, it prompts a reckoning with all that he’s left behind. Memories come back in a flood of images and associations, and the figure who looms largest in them is his younger sister, Nagisa (Nanami Yamazaki), who seems to have passed on.
We see glimpses of their neglected upbringing in a trash-strewn home where the young siblings huddle together in a cupboard while their parents have sex just outside. Whatever innocence the pair are able to enjoy as children withers with the onset of adolescence as Nagisa starts turning tricks and forbidden lust blooms between them.
This is all told in a slippery, nonlinear fashion that rewards close attention while distracting from the rather lurid nature of the story. (To his credit, Kogahara leaves the more sordid details to the viewer’s imagination.) The film isn’t as tricksy as Takuya Misawa’s “The Murders of Oiso” (2021), another striking debut feature with a fluid sense of time, but it makes you work to put all the pieces together.
When “Nagisa” screened at the Tokyo International Film Festival in 2021, the two-line summary in the festival program offered more clarity than the film itself. The central tragedy is strongly implied but never explicitly stated. This is a ghost story, though it leaves you wondering who is doing the haunting.
Key plot points are alluded to rather than shown head-on, even if this is just through judicious framing or shallow depth-of-field leaving things tantalizingly out of view. In an interview with Variety last year, Kogahara said that much of the film’s dialogue was cut during the editing process. The silences speak louder anyway.
A U.S.-educated filmmaker with a background in commercials and music videos, Kogahara has clearly been paying attention to recent trends in international cinema — the kind of arthouse fare that finds a home on boutique streaming services such as Mubi. The aesthetic of “Nagisa” is a big part of its allure. Cinematographer Ryo Ishida’s saturated imagery and Takeshi Ogawa’s immersive sound design make the film feel sensual, clammy and uncomfortably intimate.
Style is inseparable from substance here: Fuminao’s life has been exploded by guilt and grief, and these fragments are all that remain. His visits to the tunnel could be a way of dredging up his memories or trying to connect with his sister’s spirit, but they also look a lot like purgatory. “Nagisa” is a bad trip, but an absorbing one.
| Rating | |
|---|---|
| Run Time | 87 mins. |
| Language | Japanese |
| Opens | Now showing |
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